10 TIPS to Start Fast with Facebook Video

Many marketers want to know how to start with video marketing will turn to YouTube by good reason: Youtube has the big potential to reach a big audience because of 300 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute. But now

Facebook is the another equally large and quickly growing video home: Check out: Live Leap

Mark Zuckerberg thought that he was “looking forward to seeing people share many the content of video. It’s just completely obligating” during its third-quarter earnings call in 2014.

His forecast seems to have come true. Facebook is showing signs of taking videos more and more seriously.

It’s time to look at Facebook closely and get how to use videos to occupy more fans on the platform.

To follow along with our Facebook experiments!

You can get all the videos uploaded on Facebook here. Because Buffer has been experimenting with videos on Facebook lately by uploading videos from our Social Media Strategies email course natively. We have been experimenting with the time of day the videos get shared and with the post update text.

On the performance of the videos we are still in the process of gathering data. We have started to track our stats in an worksheet of excel that I would like to share with you if you are interested in learning with us.

Top 10 Facebook Video Tips for Starters

You can want to try for yourself on Facebook if you feel like video is something, there are 10 tips to help you design videos that captivate your audience below.

(More tips, there’s some great stuff in Facebook’s best practices guide.)

To upload your videos natively (via Buffer!)

Your audience seen a video uploaded natively directly in Facebook more than links shared to YouTube or other video services.

(“Natively” namely videos were uploaded to a network directly and played straight in a feed or timeline, versus those that are uploaded elsewhere and shared as links, e.g. YouTube videos.)

Over 180,000 Facebook video posts across 20,000 Facebook pages and found the following is analyzed by SocialBakers:

Natively uploaded videos on Facebook are winning nearly an 80 percent share of all video interactions happening on the social media site.

Translation: Native Facebook videos are seeing more and more interactions than those from YouTube, Vimeo, and other sites.

How native videos grew over the course of last year below:

Buffer recently launched the ability to upload videos directly to your queue and post them natively on Facebook while still being able to take advantage of your optimal Buffer schedule!

To catch people’s attention within the first 3 seconds

Videos on Facebook unlike other video platforms, they appear within the users’ feed—and, here’s the kicker—as they scroll through, the video will autoplay in order to captivate their attention and convince them to watch more.

As such, your video should have a powerful first few seconds that captivate even without sound.

as proven by their 6.8 billion video views on Facebook to date, buzzfeed has become a master at this.

This is how they’ve done it:

Immediate start – . In general the first frame is already geared towards piquing someone’s interest. Buzzfeed doesn’t waste time in capturing people’s attention. There are a few examples of the first frames of Buzzfeed videos below:

Tease the video with a short post update – Sometimes this is the title of the video itself (if that is compelling enough). Other times they tease what the video is about.

Great thumbnails – As people scroll through their Facebook feed and can also catch a glimpse of the video thumbnail. Buzzfeed uploads custom thumbnails that do a great job at capturing the attention. As you can see that it is a selection of their thumbnails below:

Tip: Uploading a Custom Thumbnail

You are allowed to upload a custom thumbnail for the videos you have uploaded.

In the first times upload a video, a new window pops up will give you the option to select a custom thumbnail for your video.

In contrary, you can easy go to “Edit your Video if you didn’t upload a custom thumbnail for the videos you have already uploaded on Facebook”.

After that to select your file, let click on the “Add Custom Thumbnail” button.

To creat Content Exclusively for Facebook

To try to create content posted exclusively on Facebook, you can create a sense of exclusivity for your audience. It will feel rewarding for your fans and might even encourage more people to follow so as not to miss anything.

To encourage people to follow your page on Facebook would be to promote the exclusive content posted on Facebook on your other social networks. You can make your audience aware that following your page will provide them with even more exciting and different content.

To Creat Videos That Are Shareable

Users will share content on Facebook that their gets discovered and the same holds true for videos.

As Buzzfeed’s executive vice president Ze Frank of video, he explained it well at VidCon 2015:

People do not share videos to talk about you, but about themselves.

So try to give them something that allows them to spark up a conversation with their loved ones.

Buzzsumo has conducted a great research of 100 million articles to figure out what makes content shareable. Amongst its findings, one of the most interesting includes this:

To Tease/Get Information

Facebook provide a tease or information about the video can also help stop viewers as they scroll through their feed. In order to set up the expectations of what will be seen in the video, facebook recommends “getting out of a key cite or moment from the video as the text component of your post” .

This is a couple examples:

To Add a Call-To-Action

The option of adding a call-to-action is provided on your video to encourage viewers to visit a website, watch more of your videos or even purchase something by Facebook.

You can check out the last frame to see the call-to-action. (This is the “Watch More” cta.)

How to set it up:

In your video, let go to the “Edit Video” section and find various options under the section “Call to Action”, (Learn More, Watch More, Shop Now, Book Now, Sign Up and Download).

Select the text you want to appear at the end of your video. After that you can add the URL of the page you want people to visit and a description of the page.

This is on of the Call-to-action we use on Buffer:

To Tag Other Pages

You can use another tool to try and spread the organic reach of your video is tagging other pages that either contributed to the video or that you want to make aware of the video. It is important to keep the tagging relevant in order not to spam.

Some examples of “Who to Tag” in here:

To contribute to the video directly. – “Featuring Taylor Swift“

To mention in the video. – “We tell the reason why we love Harry Potter.”

To inspire you to make the video. – “HT to Leo Widrich for the inspiration.”

To relate to the video or that you would like to make aware of the video. – “We want tag Buffer to get challenge next.”

Just like on Twitter, you can use the symbol “@” and type the title of the page or person you want to tag and a few options should appear for you to pick so that you can tag someone on Facebook.

To Use Video Insights To Gather Performance Information

Facebook provides metrics such as video views, unique video views, the average duration people viewed your video, and audience retention that you can examine for each video that you post.

This can provide great insights into which videos design the most engagement with your viewers.

You can get more details about the metrics here. I offer you look at some of the key metrics include:

Video Retention – In the graphic, the curve will illustrate your point at which the audience dropped off. To understand things that makes people stop watching may help you in designing better content by looking at that point .

30-Second Views – This is the number of people having watched your video for 30 seconds (or to completion if your video is less than 30 seconds).

Auto-Play vs. Click-to-Play Filter – You will be provided information on the people that clicked on your video to watch it. You can use this information to then compare them to people that didn’t click and discover if they behave differently while watching the same video.

What Topic Does Best? What about is food!

In fact Buzzfeed’s top 5 videos of all time are about food. The article have written recently about Buzzfeed, ReelSEO found that “Food is by far the most popular content for video uploads to Facebook”.

I’m obviously not talking that you should make videos about food if your business is clearly unrelated to that. However this subject is an interesting thing to note and if you do have content centered on food, then Facebook can become a new best friend of you for your video content.

To Be Strategic and Creative with Featured Video

Facebook allows you make a first good impression for visitors of your page when you can choose a featured video to appear on your page’s. It can be a great feature.

In your page when you want to add a featured video, to go to tab “Video” (to reveal the video tab, you may have to click tab “More” ) .

In order to you select a video to feature from the videos already uploaded on your Facebook page, you can click on the button “Add Featured Video”.

If you select the option “Show map, check-ins and star ratings on the Page” under the Address section in your Page Info, to note that the featured video will not appear .

BESIDES:

Facebook Ads

To run ads and get your videos discovered by a larger audience, so in-depth data of facebook on its users makes it a great platform .

To natively promote your videos using their unique proprietary targeting data, you can use Facebook Ads. For example, you make a video about tables in Paris, France. Facebook will permit you to target people, having shown an interest in furniture and lived in Paris.

You can discover more information about Facebook Ads and create one here.

If your ad be created, you can choose the option “Get Video Views”. And upload a video that is not on your Facebook page yet or select a video already uploaded in your page’s Library.

Then Facebook will suggest various options to customize and target ad of you. In example above, if we use tables in Paris, we’ll clearly want to select “Paris, France” for the “Location” section and “Furniture” in the section of “Interest” .

The ad will be appear in user’s Facebook feed by this way:

Embed Facebook Videos In Blog Posts

So that your Facebook videos even further, you can embed them into your blog post.

To go to the video you want to embed, select “Options” then “Embed Video” and you can get the embed code. After that, you can copy and paste the code provided by Facebook, on your website at the video to appear

Facebook has give more information on how to embed videos here.

Over To You!

You can set off and create your Facebook videos right now.

What experience have you had with Facebook videos? Do you get any tips and tricks that may help other readers with their Facebook video strategy? Let share them with me in the comments!